You have a deadline looming. However, instead of doing your work, you are fiddling with miscellaneous things like checking email, social media, watching videos, surfing blogs and forums. You know you should be working, but you just don’t feel like doing anything.
We are all familiar with the procrastination phenomenon. When we procrastinate, we squander away our free time and put off important tasks we should be doing them till it’s too late. And when it is indeed too late, we panic and wish we got started earlier.
The chronic procrastinators I know have spent years of their life looped in this cycle. Delaying, putting off things, slacking, hiding from work, facing work only when it’s unavoidable, then repeating this loop all over again. It’s a bad habit that eats us away and prevents us from achieving greater results in life.
Don’t let procrastination take over your life. Here, I will share my personal steps on how to stop procrastinating.
14 Practical Ways to Stop Procrastinating
These 14 ways will definitely apply to you too:
1. Break Your Work into Little Steps
Part of the reason why we procrastinate is that subconsciously, we find the work too overwhelming for us. Break it down into little parts, then focus on one part at a time. If you still procrastinate on the task after breaking it down, then break it down even further. Soon, your task will be so simple that you will be thinking, “gee, this is so simple that I might as well just do it now!”.
For example, I’m writing a new book on how to achieve anything in life. Book writing at its full scale is an enormous project and can be overwhelming. However, when I break it down into phases such as –
- (1) Research
- (2) Deciding the topic
- (3) Creating the outline
- (4) Drafting the content
- (5) Writing Chapters #1 to #10,
- (6) Revision
- (7) etc.
Suddenly it seems very manageable. What I do then is focus on the immediate phase and get it done to the best ability without thinking about the other phases. When it’s done, I move on to the next.
Lists are very useful if you can’t stop procrastinating because they help us deal with at least two of the three factors that cause procrastination risk-aversion and rewards.
2. Change Your Environment
Different environments have different impacts on our productivity. Look at your work desk and your room. Do they make you want to work, or do they make you want to snuggle and sleep? If it’s the latter, you should look into changing your workspace.
One thing to note is that an environment that makes us feel inspired before may lose its effect after some time. If that’s the case, then it’s time to change things around.
For instance, if you can’t work in public places because of the constant movement and noise, then find a quiet place to sit down and focus.
To avoid procrastinating and focus on what you’ve decided to focus on, try to remove every possible distraction from your work environment—both physical and digital. For example, you can take your iPhone, put it on ‘Do Not Disturb,’ and then put it in a drawer that requires you to physically get up to check it. Disable the notifications and alerts on all your devices, too. Basically, un-plug before you plug-in and focus.
3. Create a Detailed Timeline with Specific Deadlines
Having just onw deadline for your work is like an invitation to procrastinate. That’s because we get the impression that we have time and keep pushing everything back until it’s too late.
Break down your project (see tip #1), then create an overall timeline with specific deadlines for each small task. This way, you know you must finish each task by a certain date. Your timelines must be robust, too – i.e., if you don’t finish this by today, it will jeopardize everything else you have planned after that. This way, it creates the urgency to act.
My goals are broken down into monthly, weekly, right down to the daily task lists, and the list is a call to action that I must accomplish by the specified date, or else my goals will be put off.
4. Eliminate Your Procrastination Pit-Stops
If you are procrastinating a little too much, maybe that’s because you make it easy to procrastinate.
Identify your browser bookmarks that take up a lot of your time and shift them into a separate folder that is less accessible. Disable the automatic notification option in your email client. Get rid of the distractions around you.
I know some people will get out of the way and delete or deactivate their Facebook accounts. I think it’s a little drastic and extreme as addressing procrastination is more about being conscious of our actions than counteracting via self-binding methods, but if you feel that’s what’s needed, go for it.
5. Reduce the Number of Decisions You Need to Make
Every decision we make has an energy consequence. If you wake up in the morning and you need to ask yourself, “What do I need to do today?” — well, you’re about to procrastinate today.
If you approach each new day without having given thought to what you want it to look like ahead of time, then you’ll waste a large portion of your energy thinking about what to do and what not to do.
- Should I hit the gym today or go tomorrow?
- Should I say yes to lunch with Barry Boombatz from Accounting, or should I do a quick lunch solo so I can get back to the office and finish this presentation?
- Should I wear this or wear that?
- Eat this or eat that?
- Reply now or later?
We’re asking ourselves questions like this all day long.
Questions compel us to respond with answers, which compel us to make decisions. This drains you of your self-control and makes you tired—which leads to you procrastinating on whatever matters most in your life.
Reduce the number of decisions you need to make during a given day by making those decisions ahead of time and/or creating habits around certain areas of your life to boost your effectiveness and prevent you from draining your energy by thinking about whether to do them or not.
These are just a few simple examples, but it’s usually the simple things that matter most.
What are some examples you can think of to reduce the number of decisions you make in your own life? Doing this will free up the energy you’ll need to stay focused on doing the big and meaningful stuff rather than procrastinating on it by doing the little and meaningless stuff.
6. Finish Your Day Before It Starts
This tip picks up where tip #1 leaves off. The best decision you can make to avoid procrastination is to plan your days in advance.
Rather than frantically figuring out what you’ll do on any given day, a better way to approach your day would be to take a few minutes at the end of each day to quickly map out the following day.
For example, every night, before bed, I write down/review my plans for the next day, which include:
- My One BIG Thing (OBT) that needs to get done that day. This could be a big task, a goal, or a project I need to make progress on.[1]
- My No Matter Whats (NMWs) — these are my non-negotiable daily habits: exercise, my nature walk/daily meditation, reading (30 minutes minimum), mastery-related work, and time spent with the people I love.
Whatever else needs to be done the following day. This way, my most important goals, and projects are given ample time to be crushed—and to not be procrastinated on.
7. Re-Clarify Your Goals
If you have been procrastinating for an extended period, it might reflect a misalignment between what you want and what you are currently doing. Oftentimes, we outgrow our goals as we discover more about ourselves, but we don’t change our goals to reflect that.
Get away from your work (a short vacation will be good, else just a weekend break or staycation will do too) and take some time to regroup yourself. What exactly do you want to achieve? What should you do to get there? What are the steps to take? Does your current work align with that? If not, what can you do about it?
8. Stop Overcomplicating Things
Are you waiting for a perfect time to do this? That maybe now is not the best time because of X, Y, Z reasons? Ditch that thought because there’s never a perfect time. If you keep waiting for one, you are never going to accomplish anything. Perfectionism is one of the biggest reasons for procrastination.
Watch this video for more more on procrastination:
9. Reward Yourself
Some people say that rewards aren’t good motivation. Don’t believe them. Those people are probably criminals.
OK, maybe not—but they’re only right about external rewards, a.k.a. “bribes”. As it happens, offering rewards to employees often doesn’t increase motivation.
But offering rewards to yourself—well, that’s just good common sense. You need that Bing! moment—you are, after all, simply a giant hairless ape with a yen for gourmet coffee and a laptop. This is a good hack if you just can’t stop procrastinating.
Researchers placed monkeys in a cage, with a button that, when pressed, dispensed a piece of food. “Yum!” said the monkey when he pushed the button. So he pushed it again. And again. Monkeys are, of course, just small hairy people without coffee or laptops, so they learn pretty fast.
Then the researchers added a twist: every third time the monkey pushed the button, he’d get an electric shock! “Ouch!” said the monkey—then he ate his treat. “Ouch ouch!” he said, the next time—then he ate his treat.
The moral of this story is that we’ll put up with quite a bit of crap, as long as we get our treat. Your challenge, then, is to find a treat good enough to hit the button for, even though you know it’s going to hurt like heck.
10. Give Yourself a Break
Don’t be too hard on yourself if you are having a tough time beating procrastination. Remember, you are human and we love to sit and stew in our own uncompleted mess of work sometimes. Just work hard to get out of it.
In fact, taking a break helps with your productivity, here’s why: The Importance of Scheduling Downtime
When you’re tired or have low motivation, take a break. Don’t be so hard on yourself about the timing of a task and then you won’t try to escape through procrastination so hard in the future. Just reschedule and get back on track later or tomorrow.
And since we are plugged in to the digital world. We constantly have music or sound on. It can be overwhelming and stressful, causing us to tune out of work and life.
A break as short as 5 minutes is enough to keep your mind sharp and wards off fatigue. I recommend you to use the Pomodoro Time Tracker. It is a great tool to help you take breaks at set intervals. Simply start the 25-minute timer, and follow the prompts.
11. Hang out with People Who Inspire You to Take Action
I’m pretty sure if you spend just 10 minutes talking to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, you’ll be more inspired to act than if you spent the 10 minutes doing nothing. The people we are with influence our behaviors. Of course spending time with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates every day is probably not a feasible method, but the principle applies — The Hidden Power of Every Single Person Around You
Identify the people, friends or colleagues who trigger you – most likely the go-getters and hard workers – and hang out with them more often. Soon you will inculcate their drive and spirit too.
As a personal development blogger, I “hang out” with inspiring personal development experts by reading their blogs and corresponding with them regularly via email and social media. It’s communication via new media and it works all the same.
12. Get a Motivation Buddy
Having a companion makes the whole process much more fun. Ideally, your buddy should be someone who has his/her own set of goals. Both of you will hold each other accountable to your goals and plans. While it’s not necessary for both of you to have the same goals, it’ll be even better if that’s the case, so you can learn from each other.
I have a good friend whom I talk to regularly, and we always ask each other about our goals and progress in achieving those goals. Needless to say, it spurs us to keep taking action.
13. Tell Others About Your Goals
This serves the same function as #6, on a larger scale. Tell all your friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family about your projects. Now whenever you see them, they are bound to ask you about your status on those projects.
For example, sometimes I announce my projects on The Personal Excellence Blog, Twitter and Facebook, and my readers will ask me about them on an ongoing basis. It’s a great way to keep myself accountable to my plans.
14. Seek out Someone Who Has Already Achieved the Outcome
What is it you want to accomplish here, and who are the people who have accomplished this already? Go seek them out and connect with them. Seeing living proof that your goals are very well achievable if you take action is one of the best triggers for action.
Get a Grip and Just Do It!
At the end, it boils down to taking action. You can do all the strategizing, planning and hypothesizing, but if you don’t take action, nothing’s going to happen. Occasionally, I get readers and clients who keep complaining about their situations but they still refuse to take action at the end of the day.
Reality check:
I have never heard anyone procrastinate their way to success before and I doubt it’s going to change in the near future. Whatever it is you are procrastinating on, if you want to get it done, you need to get a grip on yourself and do it.
Reference
| [1] | ^ | Dean Bokhari: The One Thing Book Summary |
